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Sunday 16 June 1816 was a red-letter day for Schubert and his young musical contemporaries: the fiftieth anniversary of the arrival in Vienna of their composition and singing teacher, Antonio Salieri, was celebrated in grand style. The events of the day can be told best in a diary entry from the composer himself:

Herr Salieri celebrated his jubilee yesterday, having been fifty years in Vienna, and nearly as long in the service of the Emperor; he was awarded a gold medal by His Majesty and invited many of his pupils of both sexes. The works written for the occasion by his composition students were performed according to the order in which they came under his tuition, from youngest to oldest. The event was framed by a chorus and an oratorio, both by Salieri, entitled Jesus al Limbo. The oratorio is in a genuinely Gluckian manner. The entertainment was interesting for everybody.

Considering the astonishing musical maturity of the composer in 1816, the nineteen-year-old Schubert’s prose is that of a well-mannered schoolboy – slightly stilted, as if he is overawed by the grandeur of a formal occasion and the attendant pomp and ceremony of the Imperial court. The diary entry above had begun with a paragraph where the ‘pure, holy nature’ of Salieri’s art is compared to the ‘unnatural conditions of our age’. The young composer takes several rather half-hearted swipes at unnamed composers whose music-making is described bizarre and eccentric, and the blame is laid at the door of someone who is ‘one of our greatest German artists’. It seems that this last phrase is Schubert’s gloss on Beethoven, not Salieri’s, and it is clear that the young composer already has divided loyalties as far as his great contemporary is concerned. Beethoven was obviously Salieri’s bugbear; the well-ordered and disciplined studio of the old Italian composer was seen (especially by Salieri himself) to foster the old-fashioned virtues of music where Gluck was the paradigm. Salieri believed (and his faithful student here dutifully repeats the dictum) that his own music, unlike Beethoven’s, was made to lift the listener up to God, rather than to incite him to laughter or goad him to madness with ‘howlings’ and ‘Harlequinades’. As we read these words we sense that Schubert was not convinced of their truth; on a day devoted to honouring his old teacher he was allowing himself to repeat idées reçues. This occasion seems to mark the end of Schubert’s studentship, and it is the last time that we find him toeing the party line of the old guard in this manner. His ceremonial music written for the occasion is a postlude rather than an overture.

In reality, Schubert had been flying free of Salieri’s influence for a long time, but he seems to have been willing, even eager, to acknowledge his debt to the discipline of old-fashioned musical skills with which he had been rigorously instilled. The present-day singer or accompanist performing Schubert has cause to be grateful for this: this composer was trained from the beginning to put his musical thoughts down on paper in the clearest and least ambiguous fashion. Let two examples suffice: the composer’s various tempo markings, the distinction between c and cut-time alla breve for example, are an almost infallible guide to what he wanted from his performers; and his feeling for vocal melody, and its expressive possibilities, displays an Italianate flair because it was fostered by an Italian opera-composer. The lack of methodical teaching of this kind is especially evident in the case of self-taught composers like Robert Schumann.

Schubert was always torn in his loyalties between the old and the new – a struggle which was to characterize his artistic life. His music, delicately poised between the Classical and Romantic, takes inspiration, Janus-like, from each, and remains impossible to typecast to this day. That Schubert was genuinely fond of Salieri is without doubt; the fact that the music written for the Jubelfeier is set to the composer’s own texts is an indication of this. Schubert was scarcely a man of many words, and whenever he took the trouble to express himself in the written word we can be certain that his feelings were sincerely engaged, whatever the level of literary skill displayed in the process.

The pupils’ gathering took place at Salieri’s home; the honoured host sat at the piano with fourteen female pupils arranged in a semicircle on his right; they included Betty Vio and Caroline Unger who were both to become well-known singers. On his left, also in a semicircle, sat twelve male pupils including Anselm Hüttenbrenner and Schubert himself. Josef Weigl, a famous Viennese opera-composer more than thirty years older than Schubert, was also included in this line-up. All the composition pupils, past and present, brought a dedicatory work with them, and Moscheles and Hummel, unable to be in Vienna for the occasion, had sent vocal compositions. It must have been a lengthy evening and Schubert’s work appeared about a third of the way through. There is some disagreement, however, about what was actually performed. There are four Schubert pieces associated with this event, and three of these were presented to Salieri – certainly the little tenor aria, and the unaccompanied canon. The first and second editions of the Deutsch catalogue disagree on which version of ‘Gütigster, Bester! Weisester, Grösster!’ was performed. Deutsch favours the vocal trio with piano, even giving it a separate, and later, number, D441. But Deutsch argues that it is the unaccompanied version for four male voices which appears in the dedicatory manuscript. As this was actually presented to Salieri, it seems likely that this would have contained the final version.

Accordingly it is the trio with piano that we hear first, as the probable earlier setting. The introductory bar for piano instigates a mood of Handelian grandeur in oratorio style; the words ‘most good’, ‘best’ and ‘wisest’ cap each other in rising sequence for three full-throated singers as the double-dotted chords in the piano stride through the stave in pomposo fashion. It was more usual to use this style to praise the Almighty, but a day such as this was meant to celebrate Salieri’s apotheosis as a god of composition. At ‘So lang ich Tränen habe’ we are reminded that Salieri, a notable composer of galant music, was impressed by the old-fashioned contrapuntal disciplines, and Schubert knew this. After the concerted opening, the three singers present themselves one by one: with an accompaniment of pulsating semiquavers the bass has a four-bar solo; he is then joined, in the manner of a canon, by the second tenor. When the first tenor joins with the same melody, making a full three-part vocal texture, the accompaniment blossoms into demisemiquavers. The music gathers momentum with a repeat of the opening words and a return to an accompaniment in double-dotted rhythm in a lofty, if rather conventional, style. The high tone of the opening words seems to have promised a more substantial work, but Schubert, already a consummate professional, has his eye on the clock and realizes that he needs to keep the piece short.

Why this piano-accompanied trio was not eventually presented at Salieri’s party is uncertain. It seems that, in the end, the composer decided to write an unaccompanied vocal quartet instead. Perhaps there was an extra singer who needed to be included in the proceedings, and perhaps it was even Schubert himself who took part as the fourth singer rather than the pianist? At first glance it seems that this version began as a reworking of the piano-accompanied material but, Schubert being Schubert, it was soon evident that the piece needed to be completely recomposed. On the whole, despite the lack of blustery flourishes from the piano, this is a more interesting piece of music. It is longer, and the harmonic ideas are more developed, albeit within the limited range acceptable to Salieri. The lead tenor (in the absence of a lied tenor) is a singer of greater range than the one for whom the piano-accompanied version was written; indeed, it is a feature of this setting that the suitably extravagant settings of the words ‘Gütigster’ and ‘Bester’ are initiated by solo high notes suspended, star-like, on the stave, until the first tenor’s colleagues join him with the corroborative harmonies.

The little tenor aria ‘So Güt’ als Weisheit strömen mild’ is typical of a number of the 1816 songs: sweet and gentle and in the manner of Mozart. The key is a gently affectionate G major with a middle section where the opening words are set again, this time in B major. The lie of these harmonies, particularly the seventh chord under ‘strömen mild’, reminds the Schubertian of better-known music – the ‘O Bächlein meiner Liebe’ section of Der Neugierige from Die schöne Müllerin. It seems that this composer’s vocabulary of word-to-music associations and motifs is already largely formed: the idea of something streaming forth as a source of instruction – whether Salieri’s wisdom, or the millstream (in this case, also an oracle) – invokes a similar response in Schubert’s mind, and in the special key of B major. Also familiar is the shift into the subdominant for the mention of heavenly things. At ‘Engel bist du mir auf Erden’ (admittedly not the greatest line ever penned by an amateur poet) the music slips seraphically into C major. Even in the note-spinning of occasional music there are treasures to be found if the composer is Franz Schubert.

The final little Canon a tre ‘Unser aller Grosspapa’ might have given the old man the greatest pleasure of all. It is a simple little construction musically and, in its range of almost two octaves, impractical for all but a trio of the most accomplished singers. The Anglo-Saxon perhaps finds it a little embarrassing to address a teacher as ‘Grandpa’, but it seems to be more a part of the paternalistic German teaching tradition; the great baritone Gerhard Hüsch, for example, was regularly addressed as ‘Papi’ by his devoted pupils well into the 1970s.